In the article mentioned an important word in regard to UX : ECOSYSTEMS. UX teams must create ecosystems of the product or service because it can help them discover the needs, behavior and user attitudes regarding the product.

Hello, Andy. I’m translating your article into Russian for frontender.info magazine and got stuck on “meaircans”. Could you please help me sort out the meaning of this word? That would be great, thanks.

Andy… I’m deeply appreciating your genius sharing. Something deep inside me has always been furious at the lack of “quality total experiences” from brands offerings in the marketplace, and this cuts right to the heart of it.

So thankful to read this, and I’ll aim to live up to the implications & potential it reveals.

Thanks folks for the feedback, it’s very much appreciated. Sorry for my delayed response too – I’ve been blissfully away and offline for a week.

@Natalia - yes, sorry, I’m not sure how “meaircans” got in there, but I like it as a word. I just need to find a meaning for it.

@Chomp Digital - Thanks. This one took a while but I had some great editing from Sara.

@Jason - Thanks too. I will admit, though, that it is a lot easier to say/write this than to do it. Designing engaging services is complicated and hard enough, but delivering them is really difficult, which is why so many are average or worse.

Talking about the case with airlines. I hade the worse experience when flying with Lufthansa from Bologna. Their Android app gave me a QR code instead of a proper for boarding card, the only problem is that not all airports has devices that can scan QR codes and validate it’s authenticity. This resulted in a very stressful situation and some expensive data roaming.

Thank you for this great article Andy, larger companies have to put a higher value on holistic experience design that flows between different devices and different contexts .

@Filip - thanks for example. This stuff happens all the time an it’s something that just would not be acceptable on a product (you would return it as faulty) but services often get away with it.

@Paul - you make an important point. I’m not sure if you’re talking about web designers controlling what they can control or service providers. If it’s the former, it’s important to be sure you’re not just “polishing a turd” when working on a project to try and mask the problems of what is clearly a flawed service elsewhere. If it’s the service provider, it’s true, not everything is in their control. But they do have the power to mitigate the effects of when things go wrong. How companies deal with and recover from failure is often as, if not more, important than just getting it right in he first place. It’s also important that marketing doesn’t hype and promise something the service can’t deliver. We’re sold the dream of accessing our media everywhere from the cloud, for example, but crappy territory licensing screws that up all the time. We’re sold the ease of flying due to self check-in via smart phones, but there’s poor or no backup when it goes wrong, as Filip’s example shows. One could write a long list of examples here, from mobile broadband flat rates that aren’t, five star hotels that aren’t, things that “just work” that don’t.

The challenge is to evidence service quality - the old joke about “if Microsoft Windows was a car…” resonates because we recognise that it is challenging to assess the quality of services and intangible artefacts like software (which are, I would argue, services in any case) before it’s too late. Insurance, pensions and healthcare services are other prime examples, as are lawyers (who, in Australia at least, you can’t sue if they turn out to be useless and lose your case. You still have to pay them).